[ale] OT: Editing a DVD

[aaron]

On Tuesday 29 August 2006 09:39, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I'm having such a hard time trying to figure out how to edit a DVD.  All
> the video formats are getting confusing and it seems like any Windows
> program I try does not seem to support reading the video from the DVD.

(Because I know you have an iMac at the house...)

As a person with 25+ years professional media production experience,
my first advice for anyone interested in doing this kind of work as a hobby or 
on any other regular basis is to get a Mac OSeX box. They are the most 
integrated and complete digital media systems available out of the box, and 
even a Mini-Mac with a "Superdrive" (DVD writer) has enough horsepower to be 
very productive tool with just the included "iLife" package of system 
software.

That said, I do have a couple suggestions to help with what your are
trying accomplish...

> On Linux I wanted to try Kino but all the dependencies made it almost
> impossible to get compiled.

There are Kino binaries available for a lot of distros; maybe some digging 
around will provide a path to getting it installed. There are also a couple 
of Distros with a media production focus, but you would need to hunt them
down on Distrowatch, since I don't recall their names right now.

In any case, to get a functional hardware system for media production with 
commodity PC components, the best approach is to build the hardware around 
the application, especially in terms of "compatible" graphics and audio 
subsystems. It's the same case with the broken Windows world where you have 
to do a lot of system design and OS de-crippling to make the ad-hoc parts 
work together.

> Here is what I'm trying to do.
> 
> 1.  Record Survivorman onto a DVD+RW using
>     a DVD+R/RW set top record

That part should have been fairly no brainer with a dedicated Set Top DVD 
recorder. So you have the first step done...

> 2.  Edit video to remove commercials and 
>     make sure the beginning is the start of
>     the show and the end is the credits.

This actually involves a couple of steps with different software tools.

I'm not aware of any software on any platform that can directly
edit muxed DVD VOB mpeg2 files; most available editing software
will require that you convert the DVD files to DV format, the
format used for MiniDV and Digital 8 camcorders.  Be aware that
this is a high quality format that is only compressed at 5 to 1, so an
hour of video requires roughly 12 GB of disk space.

The Free (as in beer) Mac OSeX tool I use for this step is called
MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5. It is a VERY complete and well
designed application (-; perhaps because it is made by Italians ;-).

The dvd::rip program may provide this for Linux, but from a quick
viewing of the web site this seems to be just a DVD copy tool that
strips DCSS from commercial DVD's; it may not provide the needed
conversion [format transcoding] abilities. (I use a tool called
MacTheRipper to protect my fair use rights).

For editing the material once it is converted to DV, Kino will do the
trick on Linux (if you can get it installed and running).  iMovie is
included in the Mac iLife bundle, though you will need the "HD" (iLife 06) 
version to handle DV Clips larger than 2 GB each.

> 3.  Create a DVD-R with the edited video.

This step requires authoring and encoding your edited DV movie
into a Video DVD disk image.

I'm not aware of any functional OSS Video DVD authoring tools on
Linux (yet). I believe Roxio TOAST now has a Linux version available for 
purchase and that this software is capable of limited Video DVD authoring.

On Mac OSeX, the iLife bundles include iDVD, and the latest [06] version is
 a VERY simple, friendly and complete Video DVD authoring and burning 
application. (Earlier iDVD version work fine, but they are a little _too_ far 
on the user friendly side and they don't always preserve encoded VOB files
and disk images in a predictable way.) 

> I've got step 1 done.  I tried Pinnacle Studio 9 which I use
> to create DVDs from my video camera but it has no clue
> how to read a VOB file on a DVD.  Strange thing is that it
> can create them but not read them?  

The joys of proprietary, non standardized, corporate controlled formats.

> I really want to do this in Linux.  Any ideas on how I can?

Not the whole process, and definitely not easily. Closest you can get right 
now is the FreeBSD layer of Mac OSeX. ;-)

HTH
peace
aaron